Data Center Switch for Load Balanced Fat-Trees

Abstract

With the growing of cloud computing, the need of computing power no longer can be satisfied with a few powerful servers or small scale parallel computer systems. More and more servers are connected together as a data center network. Then, fault tolerance becomes an import issue when building a massive data center network. Currently, many researches focus on building fat-tree data center networks. In this paper, we propose a load balanced fat-tree architecture with uniform mapping connection patterns to provide higher fault tolerance capability for heavy traffic load networks. Two fault tolerated 4 × 4 banyan type switch designs are introduced to improve the fault tolerance capability of fat-tree networks. Finally, fault tolerance capability evaluations of link or switch faults in fat-tree network are given to support our idea, and a 4 × 4 banyan type switch IC is demonstrated as the commodity switch for building the fault tolerant fat-tree data center networks. The 4 × 4 banyan type switch IC is fabricated in 90 nm CMOS technology, and the maximum operation rate of the IC is 5.8 Gbps per channel or 23.2 Gbps total data rate with only 23 ps peak-to-peak jitter.